The devfsd program is a daemon, run by the system
boot, which can provide for intelligent management
of device entries in the Device Filesystem
(devfs). It is desirable to start the daemon at
the beginning of the boot scripts, in particular
before filesystem checks.

eINIT is an alternative init system. It's quite
fast, since it can potentially be used without the
help of any scripting at all, but it is still
flexible and extremely modular. The focus is on
speed and parallelisation, mostly with embedded
devices and low-downtime servers in mind, and
benchmarks do suggest that it's doing a fairly
good job at that. It compiles cleanly (and should
thus work, provided someone writes appropriate
modules) on Linux, FreeBSD, and Darwin/Mac OS X.

ethwireck can detect if the physical layer of the
Ethernet is up. Laptops which use dynamic IP
address assignment via DHCP have the problem that
the boot process is much longer when no wire is
connected to the Ethernet card. This is because
the startup scripts have to wait for the DHCP
request to time out. ethwireck can be used in the
init script for your network card to determine
whether or not an interface should be brought up.
In other words, a timeout is avoided.

Finit is a small SysV init replacement with process supervision similar to that of daemontools and runit. Its focus is on small and embedded GNU/Linux systems, although it is fully functional on standard server and desktop installations. Finit is fast because it starts services in parallel; it then supervises and automatically restarts them if they fail. This can be extended upon with custom callbacks for all services, hooks into the boot process, or plugins to extend the functionality and adapt Finit to your needs. Finit is not only fast, it’s arguably one of the easiest to get started with. A complete system can be booted with one simple configuration file.

Firewall is a set of scripts (firewall, fwup, and fwdown) that implement an
ipchains firewall and various forms of network address and port translation.
All you have to do is read the policy file and edit it to reflect your topology
and filtering policy. It supports many different types of network topology
(single host, traditional forwarding, masquerading, port forwarding, alias port
forwarding and NAT), up to 10 untrusted interfaces each with their own policy,
and over 50 network applications. It also supports centralised administration
of multiple remote firewalls (meta-firewall).

gBootRoot makes the construction and development of distributions fun and simple with its Root Methods (Yard) and user-mode-linux test bed. Finish the product with a Boot Method (2-disk compression supported). Normal (non-root) users can make root filesystems and boot disks. It includes the make_debian script to create a testable user-mode-linux base Debian system, add-ons to enhance methods, and an MTD Emulator useful for running distributions made with the jffs/jffs2 filesystem.

genext2fs generates an ext2 filesystem as a normal
(non-root) user. It does not require you to mount
the image file to copy files on it, nor does it
require that you become the superuser to make
device nodes.

hprofile is a simple way to manage profiles for
hardware configurations, network connections,
power management, usage patterns, and many other
things. A profile can define alternate versions of
any configuration (or other) file, anywhere in the
file system, and arbitrary scripts can be run when
profiles are started or stopped (e.g. to configure
hardware or start/stop services). Special support
is also included for 'boot' profiles, allowing you
to select profiles at startup and enter different
runlevels depending on which profile was selected.
It's easy to use and configure, and comes with
comprehensive documentation.

minit is an attempt to cross-breed DJ Bernstein's daemontools and init, while adding dependencies, and maintaining minimal code base. It is possible to start and stop services on the fly. minit does not depend on a mounted /proc file system, and it does not write to any part of the file system, not even to start and stop services. It does not use System V IPC, either.